February 20, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Via Dane Carlson comes this
Via Dane Carlson comes this hilarious item: the cargo cult lives!
I've read Richard Feynman's famous description of the cargo cults, of which here's a choice snippet:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call ["sciences" like reflexology or ESP] cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
But I had no idea these things were still around. (CYA -- I'm extremely gullible, so it's possible that the article above is a hoax. It's still hilarious, however.)
This is how I feel about a lot of what passes for economic analysis in politics these days. It's dressed up with a lot of numbers, and the politicians talk fast and glib to cover the holes, but ultimately they're ignorant savages praying to the Invisible Hand and hoping that goodies will magically fall out of the sky.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 20, 2002 11:25 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links